Author Archives: cbateman

Speculative Friction by Claire Bateman “Another Poem On Blue”  Can I help it that I keep writing the same poem over & over again? No more than I can help being reborn into this world a million times every instant, a luxury so prolonged & painful that I’m unable to adequately prepare for it before, [...]

Speculative Friction by Claire Bateman Thinking East Why am I so reluctant to go home? My friend Mary has expressed it perfectly: There is a dearth of sky in Greenville. And my friend Johnny has remarked that after he moved from Kansas to Greenville, he felt as though he was always passing through a tunnel, [...]

Speculative Friction Selection from “Disorientations,” a Travel Essay by Claire Bateman Excerpt from the section, “Castings Off” “1. All throughout this trip, I experience internal pressure from the desire to leave my car by the side of the road and walk out into the prairie or desert until I can’t see any sign of civilization [...]

Speculative Friction by Claire Bateman Excerpt from the Section, “Storm Chasing” GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—7/11/11—“At nearly 80 mph, I realize that I’m not actually in motion at all. No matter how long I’m in the car, the mountains remain at an unaltered distance, the road mirages shimmer but do not change, and the desert scrub [...]

Speculative Friction by Claire Bateman                                   One of my current obsessions is finding ways to fuse the organic with the galactic in the framework of the microcosmic—thus, a series of abstract miniatures. Feel free to contact me through Weekly [...]

Speculative Friction by Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—6/13/11 Another selection from Locals, a recently completed fiction collection: “In this realm, everyone checks the atmospheric indices before each decision. In ordinary times, when the free-will quotient is high, citizens hurry to sell stocks, purchase property, propose or accept marriage, conceive children, make career shifts, create [...]

Speculative Friction by Claire Bateman In the language of this realm, there are so many words for “knowledge” that they comprise an enormous collaborative document-in-progress referred to as “The Lexicon.” There is a term for knowledge one pretends to possess as well as for knowledge one pretends to not possess, which is not precisely the [...]

Speculative Friction by Claire Bateman “Story of Your Life” After you were born, you couldn’t figure out how to fit inside your body. Sometimes you’d scrunch yourself way over to one side; other times, you’d overflow your skin in all directions, but no matter how you twisted and tossed, you couldn’t get comfortable. No wonder [...]

Speculative Friction by Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—4/18/11— “For all things are made also of what resists them. Otherwise each Atlantic wave, incoming, might spread over the prairies like a sky, and never stopping, meet the Pacific, or each single, barely perceptible spore of a fern might suddenly unfold over us a green map [...]

Speculative Friction by Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—4/11/11— “A partially understood pattern is more definite as to what it excludes than as to what its completion would include.” —Alfred North Whitehead, “Modes of Thought”